09 September 2005
One of the government's favoured think-tanks has said departmental evidence on their own targets is 'not credible', and has called for select committees to be given statutory duties to assess their performance annually.
Claudia Wood, research fellow at the Social Market Foundation and joint author of the new report To the point: a blueprint for good targets, said: 'At the moment committee chairs get to choose what they want to look at; there's no statutory obligation to look at anything in particular.
'They'd obviously need a lot more resources, but essentially they've already got the powers to do it, all it would take is for them to timetable it annually.'
In the report, the SMF criticises departmental targets as having 'perverse and unintended consequences', being poorly designed, too heavy-handed in their penalties and based on 'very poor quality data'.
Wood told Public Finance: 'First they don't use data to actually set targets, and then they don't use data to report on them.'
Citing the example of the criminal justice system, Wood said: 'There's a target to reduce the amount of criminals who are tested positive for drugs, to reduce drug-related crime.
'But they set the target without making sure that data was available, which it wasn't. So, instead police forces try and measure progress towards the target by measuring how many people are going through rehabilitation.'
There has been a tendency to use target-setting as a public relations exercise, says the SMF, rather than as a means of improvement. They find that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's 2003 housing density target, for example, was set below what had already been achieved, and thus, 'set no challenge'.
The SMF argues that while targets should be used less and designed better, responsibility for assessing the quality of data relating to them should be handed to the national audit bodies. Audit bodies should then pass data on to select committees, which should be obliged to perform annual assessments of departmental performance against targets.
Wood said that the SMF had received a 'mixed response' to their proposal from committee chairs. While many would welcome increased powers and resources, they were reluctant to have their activities more prescribed.
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